Linux 3.18-rc1 Released One Week Early With Many Changes

While Linus Torvalds initially anticipated the Linux 3.18 merge window being three weeks in length due to his Linux Foundation conference travels, he ended up managing to release Linux 3.18-rc1 after just two weeks... The release is out there now with its many changes.

Linus explained in the release announcement, "What happened is that not only did I merge actively despite travels - I was out of communication just for a couple of days (almost, but not entirely, due to flights - the hotel in DÃsseldorf lost all internet for a day too). But perhaps more importantly, people seem to have aggressively sent in their pull requests, because rc1 contains more than linux-next did a couple of days after 3.17.. So holding it up another week just seems pointless."

The Linux 3.18 kernel contains many exciting changes and new features as outlined in the numerous Phoronix articles... In the next day or so I'll have my complete recap of interesting changes merged for Linux 3.18.

Linus said due to closing the merge window one week early, he might make some exceptions for maintainers still needing to push new code this coming week. In particular, he's still hoping to merge OverlayFS.